Recently, some acquaintances of mine, who began using Puppy four years ago and who have not much more knowledge about computers and computing than me, have been offered to be taught (personally and apparently free of charge) the basics of ANSI C programming.

At the same time, their potential professor was introduced to Puppy, but he seems more comfortable teaching in another Linux distro environment than in a Puppy one.

The couple is very excited about the offer but are now fearing that they might be walking in the wrong direction and that their acceptance might loosen the binds that tie them to Puppy (something they don't want to do) and they have come to me seeking for advice.

Because I know nothing about the subject...would you mind posting here your thoughts for us?

Yeah, well it *is* best to learn about things elsewhere -since Puppy is highly-based on exceptions and re-inventing the wheel. To see how the real world operates will actually show them then exactly what puppy is -and is not.

My 35 years of experience programming in C says that a course in "the basics of ANSI C programming" can't possibly enter into topics where Puppy's deviations from "the mainstream" become an issue. We're not talking GUI programming, or systems programming, we're talking about basic C, right?

An ANSI-compliant C compiler and a text editor should be all that's needed. If the course instructor is hanging the course on a particular IDE, and a particular source-code management system, that's poor course design, IMHO. I grant that for a free course, he's entitled to call the shots.

6502coder, I think it does make a difference -just getting a workable puppy development environment up and running already deviates greatly from the normal way of things.

Amigo, my apologies for being a dummy, but I don't understand what you are getting at. These people have apparently been using Puppy for four years, so they must be reasonably familiar with the Puppy desktop and almost surely have used Geany. If they have a frugal install, then all they need is to add the devx SFS, at which point they have a C development environment which is perfectly "normal" as far as I can see.

Again, they're not trying to learn Linux system programming, just basic C programming. Last I checked, "Hello, world!" compiles and runs on Puppy Linux exactly the same way it does on every other UN*X/Linux system I've used.

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